Carty: Remembering that destiny is a choice

4:11 PM,
May 14, 2013

This photo shows part of the front page of a special edition of The News-Enterprise from March 16, 1988. With it is a copy of a speech titled "Destiny -- Choice Not Chance," composed by 10-year-old Patricia Susan ?Patty? Nunnallee of Radcliff, Ky. Patty was one of 27 people who died 25 years ago tonight when a pickup truck driven by a drunk driver and going the wrong way on an interstate slammed into a church bus near Carrolton, Ky.

Written by

Paul V. Carty
pcarty@thetowntalk.com

I've kept this box for 25 years. It is labeled "Bus Crash 1988." In it are photographs, mostly black and white; letters, handwritten or printed; and some yellowed newspaper clippings.

The photos have never been published. They have been seen by only a few people. You wouldn't print these in a newspaper-not even today, when we are all calloused and numbed by endless video streams of trouble and tragedy from all over the world. You wouldn't print these pictures, not if you knew what they show.

They show in the saddest detail what happened the night of May 14, 1988. ...